


In an Instant (a Whizfic)

by Whiz2005



Category: Transformers Generation One
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-18
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:47:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24259879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whiz2005/pseuds/Whiz2005
Summary: Whiz has been watching too much Food Network. But is there something else going on here?
Kudos: 2





	In an Instant (a Whizfic)

**Author's Note:**

> This story uses characters created for and/or developed on the Transformers: 2005 MUSH, which lives on in our hearts in 2020 and beyond.
> 
> Dedicated to the memory of Kevin Boyle, the one and only Air Beard.

**Part I: Tools**

“I understand that you want to save humanity, Whiz. I just don’t understand what that has to do with my instant pot.”

It wasn’t the first time Krystal Bryant had asked a question like this. She’d been an Earth Defense Council liaison to the Autobots for over a decade now, and friends with this particular Autobot even longer. She was used to surprises. 

Whiz retracted the magnifying half visor over her eye. As she sometimes did in the throes of an idea, she seemed to have forgotten that she was three times Krystal’s height, and first tried to make eye contact at her own level. With a rueful smile, she shifted her gaze down to human height. 

The Autobots were sometimes hard for humans to read. Their mechanical bodies and faces could be a blank slate to those unaccustomed to dealing with them. Krystal was particularly sensitive to nuances of stance and expression, which made her very good at her job. That sensitivity was rarely necessary with Whiz. 

“Tools!” Whiz pronounced, raising her right hand. At least she’d remembered to turn off the plasma torch she was holding. 

Krystal pushed her silvering blonde hair back from her face. “Tools?”

“Tools are what separates humans from animals, right? So even more advanced tools mean even more advanced humans. And what’s the most popular tool of 2019?”

While she was pretty sure here this was going, Krystal couldn’t resist a little mischief. “A hammer?”

Whiz gestured with a flourish to the silver device on her workbench. “The instant pot!”

“So it is.” There were extra wires and a new control panel – and that’s just what she could see. Krystal made a mental note to order a new pressure cooker. 

The door to Whiz’s workspace softly whooshed open. Without turning around, Krystal recognized Rodimus Prime’s confident stride. No one else entered this lab without a hint of hesitation. Ever since Whiz was assigned her own space – for the sake of everyone who needed to use the medbay – wise Autobots entered the room only when necessary. 

Krystal suspected that Whiz preferred having separate spaces for her different roles. Even a race that measures its age in centuries can mature over a decade, and it was more pronounced for an Autobot as young as Whiz. Krystal had seen her friend evolve from a medic to an engineer, though she’d never lost her focus on healing. Whiz had also become a near-permanent resident on Earth. While she still sported jaunty fins on her helmet and wrists, the green of her chassis was a more muted shade suited to the forests of British Columbia, just beyond Autobot City’s gates. 

Still, the workspace had a blast-proof door for a reason. And reinforced walls. 

“Krystal!” She turned to face the leader of the Autobots. His face was open and friendly – a change from the solid, semi-grim expression he wore during his official duties. He had also been forced to mature quickly, but this was a safe space for him. “Alex and Gwen said I’d find you here.”

“Are they with you?” Whiz asked, peering behind Rodimus for Krystal’s pre-teen twins. It made sense that she was enamored of them. She’d been Aunt Whiz from birth, though it had been hard at first to get her to put away her scientist hat. It was easier now that they could hold conversations and help her with (non-explosive) inventions. 

“What responsible leader would expose kids to… whatever this is?” He strode to the workbench and prodded the new control panel. 

Krystal answered the second half of the question. “It is… was… my instant pot.”

Whiz gestured grandly. “It’s an _instant_ instant pot!”

“I… what?” Rodimus looked at Krystal for an answer. 

She shrugged. “It’s a cooking device.”

He dropped his face into his palm. “Cooking. Again?”

Whiz jabbed a finger at him. “Cooking is science and art combined.”

“We. Don’t. Eat.” His voice had the tone of resignation that comes from repetition.

Hoping to distract them both, Krystal asked, “What have you learned about cooking, Whiz?”

Rodimus was making waving-off motions behind Whiz, but it was too late. 

“I’ve watched the masters. Alton Brown. Julia Child. Iron Chef. Chopped.” She ticked each name off on her fingers. “I’ve studied the chemistry and the science of flavor.”

“Do you see this?” Rodimus asked Krystal, gesturing to a huge monitor screen on the wall. “She installed that to watch your food channel.”

“Food _network._ ”

“You told me you needed a higher definition display so you could analyze the crystalline structure of advanced alloys.” He folded his arms over the distinctive flames emblazoned on his chest. At times like this, his power radiated in an aura that was almost visible. His blue optics sparked, but not entirely with annoyance. 

“I use it for that the rest of the time.” Whiz looked at her feet. 

Rodimus pressed his advantage. “And now the twins say you’re stealing.”

“She’s saving humanity with my instant pot,” Krystal replied dryly. 

Simultaneously, Whiz said, “I can explain.”

A sparkle lit Rodimus’ blue optics. “Oh, please do.” He pulled over the flat-topped stool by the door, which Whiz kept on hand for her human visitors. The twins, Alex and Gwen, had helped her improve it over time, with a soft cushion for comfort and some buttons that Krystal never dared push. 

Krystal sighed as she found a comfortable perch, rubbing her back briefly to ease a knotted muscle. Now that her head was level with Rodimus’ chest and Whiz’s shoulders, she nodded her thanks and gestured for Whiz to continue. 

“In my research into food science, I’ve discovered that humans keep searching for ways to make food faster. No more slow cookers. Now it’s microwaves, anti-griddles, and instant pressure cookers. But that still takes valuable time. Time you could be using to plate beautifully for the judges.”

Rodimus narrowed his eyes. “Judges?”

With a sinking feeling, Krystal said, “I think you may be watching the wrong cooking shows.”

“Humans want speed. Convenience. That’s why so many of them still eat unhealthy food. It’s pre-prepared, or you can pick it up on the way home. Fast food.”

The tension between Krystal’s shoulder blades wasn’t eased by Whiz’s confident explanation. Still… She and Ed had relied on takeout and microwave dinners more often that she’d like. “You may have a point,” she acceded. 

“Exactly!” Whiz was triumphant. “The instant pot is fast, but what if it was even faster?”

Oh no. Krystal began, “But it works on…”

“Pressure! If we increase the pressure in the vessel, the food could cook even faster.”

“Please don’t…” Krystal’s protest fell on deaf ears. 

“The problem was getting it to the right tolerances. For some reason, it really wasn’t built to withstand the necessary force.”

Rodimus shot an alarmed look at Krystal and slid to his right, putting himself between her human frame and the possible death appliance. 

“But by applying some advanced alloys and a little ingenuity, I think I’ve solved that problem. This baby should cook a frozen chicken in less than a minute. Let me just…”

She reached for the control panel.

Krystal ducked.

Rodimus shouted, “Don’t touch that!”

*Beep*

**Part II: Values**

Rodimus lowered his hands, which he’d laced in front of his face. “Is that all?”

“All?” Whiz asked indignantly. “I cooked a chicken instantly!”

Krystal poked her head around the Autobot leader’s side. She sniffed the air, and sure enough, there was a waft of chicken. “It’s done?”

“Of course. Though I highly recommend letting the pressure release naturally for a few minutes to avoid… well, it’s a lot of steam.” She looked at her audience for congratulations and saw their concern. 

“Did you think it was going to explode?”

“Uh… no?” Rodimus attempted. 

“Give me some credit, guys! I’m an engineer. I understand thermodynamics.”

Rodimus had the good sense to look a little abashed. “May I?”

Whiz puffed up. “Of course.”

He stepped over to the device. “So what did you make it from? Besides advanced alloys.”

“It’s an ultra-dense material nanostructure that I originally designed for spacecraft. I converted it for application as an aerosol. The seal is a silicone variant with a crystalline matrix that can expand and contract almost instantly when exposed to heat. Stand back.” She touched a button and a blast of team shot into the air like a small geyser. 

Krystal winced and covered her ears. When the high-pitched whistle ceased, she said, “That sounds expensive.”

Whiz ducked her head slightly and rubbed the back of her neck. “Well, of course a prototype always incurs some extra costs, since you’re doing R&D and not operating at scale.”

Rodimus folded his arms. “You’re dangerous when you start talking like that. How much?”

“You know how much my patents bring in, so compared to that…”

“How. Much.”

A nervous smile crept over her face. “About 75 thousand.”

“Dollars?” Rodimus and Krystal chorused. 

“Well, duh, dollars. But at scale, I’m sure I could get it below 50,” she explained. 

Krystal hesitated to even ask. “Fifty dollars?”

Whiz waved away the question. “Fifty thousand.”

Rodimus had worked with enough human organizations to have a stronger grasp on currency than most Autobots. "That’s outrageous. Nobody could afford that, Whiz.”

“What is time worth, though?” Whiz asked.

His skeptical expression didn’t change. “How long would it take to use this thing before you modified it?”

Krystal jumped in. “Maybe twenty minutes,” she said, erring on the side of generosity. 

Whiz winced. 

“You’re charging them over $2000 per minute!” Rodimus threw up his hands and turned away to recover his poise. When he faced Whiz again, he was solid as a stone. “I understand your intent, and it’s good, but I’m not sure this is practical.”

“My first prototype cost much less, but I thought the weight might be too inconvenient. I could resume development on it, though.”

Krystal waited for Rodimus to ask, but he was looking at her. “What did it weigh?”

“Uh.” Whiz avoided eye contact and fiddled with her device. “The projection was about 70 kilograms – 150 pounds.”

“For…” Rodimus stopped to take a moment. “I think it’s time to move on to your next idea. Krystal, you can bill us for a replacement of your device.”

She smiled. “Thank you, my friend.”

Whiz began rummaging in a cabinet. “Did I show you my absolute zero anti-griddle? I’m making progress on ensuring that the ice cream doesn’t enter a quantum state as it freezes.”

“Are you trying to help the humans or kill them?”

“Right. And the nanowave just evaporated all of the water in the food…” She picked up what appeared to be a piece of dark pumice, examined it critically, and tossed it over her shoulder. 

“Was that food once?” Krystal asked, recoiling. 

“Carrot,” Whiz replied, her attention already diverted to something else. 

Krystal and Rodimus exchanged glances. 

“Ah, here!” Whiz withdrew a silver device. It was squat and cylindrical with a short dome on the top and rectangular canisters on either side. There were three round yellow lenses on the front of the dome, which gave it a friendly looking expression to human eyes. A panel was embedded in the center of the main cylinder, but it was currently dark. Whiz set it down on the workbench, followed by a human-sized electronic tablet. The whole contraption was about twice the size of the instant pot beside it.

“Dare I ask how this will destroy humanity?” Rodimus asked. 

Whiz gave her leader a look that reminded Krystal of her 13 year old daughter. “This is the Recipe-Master Fantastico!”

A chuckle escaped Krystal, who adjusted her position to alleviate a twinge in her knee. “Fantastico?”

With a satisfied nod, Whiz pronounced, “Branding.” She held the tablet out to Krystal. “Try it.”

There was a simple green power symbol on the screen, above the word Activate. Krystal hesitated, finger poised over the button. Whiz didn’t even notice, since she was busy putting groceries on the counter with the device. Rodimus casually slid back into his protective stance and gave Krystal a nod.

*whirr*

The three lenses on the device lit with a pleasant golden glow, and the dome rotated about thirty degrees in each direction before stopping to face Krystal. Four small wheels popped out of the bottom and the side canisters unfolded into tentacle-like appendages. The panel on the front lit with the image of a chef’s hat and the screen in Krystal’s hands blinked the words, “Ready to cook.”

“You made a cooking bot,” Rodimus said, shaking his head.

“I made a cooking bot!” Whiz proclaimed.

The screen changed to offer a menu of options, including recipes, scan items, suggest, and power down. Curious, Krystal selected ‘recipes’ and was surprised to see a very comprehensive list. 

“It’s pre-loaded with volumes of cookbooks and indexed by ingredient, type of meal, and category of cuisine. It can automatically convert to the number of desired servings,” Whiz explained. “Oh, and look!”

The bot was scanning each item on the counter with its optics. After each one, the ingredient showed up in a list on Krystal’s tablet. “It can analyze what you have and suggest recipes based on that.”

Krystal was already imagining how she could put this to work. “Neat.”

Rodimus needed more convincing. “And I suppose she’s supposed to give it a knife?”

“Self-contained.” Whiz tapped the compartments on the side. “All of the cutting and slicing implements are locked in the housing.” She saw Krystal draw a breath and anticipated the question. “And it’s self-cleaning. Just give it access to water and dish soap and put it in cleaning mode.”

Krystal selected a recipe based on the suggestions and the bot began feeding zucchini into its hopper. Meanwhile, the other arm began measuring dry ingredients. 

“And it costs…” Rodimus prompted. 

“Three hundred dollars,” Whiz replied, watching Krystal play with the tablet. 

“Three hundred thousand?” he prompted. 

She shook her head. “Three hundred. It’s just a prepper and mixer. It doesn’t cook anything, though it can work with a smart home to set oven temperature and time. It even has an infrared temperature sensor. But it needs tools and human help. So I need Krystal to test it for me.” 

Rodimus counted off points on his fingers. “No blades. No pressure. No steam or freezing. It doesn’t cost or weigh the same as a car. What’s the catch?”

“No catch.” A broad smile lit Whiz’s face. “Look, it’s done.”

The bot beeped. On the tablet, Krystal read, “Zucchini bread dough ready. Please preheat oven.”

“Oh, the kids love zucchini bread. I don’t know when I made it last. Do you mind?”

Whiz beamed. “Of course not. It has an electronic tether to the tablet, so it should follow you.”

Krystal climbed down from her perch and ran a hand through her short hair. Her daughter called it a mom cut, but it was convenient. “Come along, little chef!” Whiz put the bot on the floor and it trundled obediently after Krystal. “And thank you, Whiz!”

As the door whooshed open, Rodimus muttered under his breath, “Save it for when you aren’t poisoned."

“My pleasure,” Whiz said cheerfully, ignoring his comment. “Let me know how it turns out.”

The two Autobots waved briefly as Krystal left, the door closing softly behind her. 

As it sealed, Rodimus turned to his friend. “Okay. What’s the real story here?”

**Part III: Time**

Whiz’s voice dripped with innocence. “The real story?”

Rodimus approached the work bench and tapped it with his finger. “Protest all you want, but you know that humans can’t afford a device that costs and weighs that much.”

She tsked. “Some of them could, and would buy it just because nobody else can.”

“And I don’t believe your prep bot…”

“Recipe Master Fantastico.”

“… Prep bot costs $300.”

She sighed. “Okay. It doesn’t, even at volume, but we can make up the shortfall on the commercial scale model.”

He glanced over to a cabinet that was partly open and nudged it with his foot. The door swung open to reveal a litter of burned out pressure cookers. “You never needed her device at all.”

“It became obvious pretty early that I wasn’t going to reach my goal using the original model.” She eased the cabinet closed. 

“Aha, and we get to your goal. Which was?” He prompted.

“Convenience. Speed. A better life.”

He’d known Whiz for a long time – long enough to know when she was holding back. “For humanity?”

She turned her face away. “For them.”

“Krystal and Ed? I think they have a pretty good life, all things considered. They have each other, the kids, their work. Us.” There was no trace of self-consciousness in the statement. It was a far cry from his uncertain early days of leadership. 

“That’s what I mean.” She lifted her head, meeting his gaze. “Their family, their work, us. They don’t rest enough. The move was hard for them.”

“We had no choice but to move to Canada, Whiz, the way things were going…” Rodimus began.

“I know. We had no choice, but they did. And they chose us,” she explained. “The kids are worried that they push themselves too far.”

He shifted to a more gentle tone. “That’s who they are.”

“I know, believe me. But they’re not like us.” Whiz thought about the grey creeping into Krystal’s hair; the laugh lines deepening around her eyes. The way Edward lowered himself more slowly into his chair. “We have centuries. They have…” she choked, unable to continue. 

“They age.” As they stood face to face, he took her hand tenderly. 

“Yes.”

“So you invented a bot to do the work for them,” he said. “But why all the song and dance earlier?”

The smile returned to her face. “You were both suspicious that whatever I made would explode. So I started with something that could.”

“And when it didn’t…”

“… I moved on to something less outrageous.”

He chuckled. “So the quantum vegetables?”

She laughed. “An absolute zero anti-griddle? Are you crazy?”

He looked over at the dark, dessicated ‘carrot’. “And the nanowave?”

“That’s a rock.” Her optics danced. “You’ll believe anything, won’t you?”

He spluttered. “You’ve done worse!”

“Have I?” She withdrew her hand to stroke her chin in thought. “Or do you just think I have?”

He laughed, a deep rumbling sound. “You’ve fooled me already today, you fraud. Not again.”

Somehow, she made a curtsy look sarcastic. “Never.”

“I understand why you started off with the bad ideas. Sort of. But why didn’t you just tell Krystal that you made the recipe bot for her?” Seeing the look on Whiz’s face, he raised a warning finger. “I’m not calling it the Fantastico.”

“I kind of wanted to call it the iron chef, actually, but there were copyright issues.” She started putting away ingredients. 

“You’re avoiding the question.”

“I didn’t want her to know that I’m worried about her, or think I see her as anything less than before. She’d never accept if it was a gift. It would be too much. But if I ask for her help testing a prototype, she’ll agree.”

“And I noticed you happened to have all of the ingredients for zucchini bread,” he observed. 

“Well, bribes are helpful too. But she’s doing it because she’s helping me. Everyone wins.” 

Rodimus smiled. “Just when I think I’ve seen everything from you.”

She wagged her finger at him. “I can still surprise you. The one thing you should know by now is never to underestimate me.”

“Actually,” he confessed, voice settling in a lower tone, “I did. I never thought you’d paid attention to them getting older. I just assumed you and the kids were always goofing off in here together.”

“Rodimus,” she chided, stepping closer to him. “They’re my friends. Of course I care.”

“You can’t…” He was surprised at the emotion choking his voice. “We can’t stop it.”

“I know,” she said gently, placing her palm on his chest. “But we can give them more time.”

**Author's Note:**

> Krystal Bryant used with permission from her creator.
> 
> Instant Pot, Rodimus Prime, Autobots, Autobot City, etc. used for entertainment purposes only. This is intended only to put a smile on the faces of my friends. 
> 
> This version of 2019 is a mixture of MUSH canon and real life. Autobot City had to move to Canada for reasons most people could probably figure out. There’s a wall between Mexico and America, but Chikome-Ollin put it there. This is also not set in 2020, because who could make that fun?


End file.
